Source: El Alvi from Flickr
Sitting too much is bad for you. Everyone knows that. As long as you follow the recommendation of 150 mins of exercise a week, you’ll be fine, right?
Nope.
Sitting is a great way to relax for people. Whether it be to rest during a car ride or to focus on some work, humans like to sit. This is quite notable with the availability of chairs almost everywhere — in restaurants, in theaters, in cars, at homes, in parks, at bus stops etc. It is a great way to rest the body when there isn’t much to do, without taking as much space as lying down.
Source: loop_oh from Flickr
With today’s modern lifestyle, many people are sitting pretty much all day everyday. For example, students sit to eat meals, sit during travels, sit during class and sit to do work. Sure, sitting is very useful and comfortable. But this comes at a cost. Not only are there problems associated with bad posture, its harmfulness to human health has earned it the slogan ‘sitting is the new smoking‘.
The British Journal of Sports Medicine published a paper which claims that each hour of sitting while watching TV will reduce a person’s lifespan by 21.8 min. The study suggests that someone who watches an average of 6 hr of TV a day throughout their entire life would die 4.8 years earlier than someone who has not watched any TV.
There is also a popular belief that sitting time can be negated by exercise time. But like I said at the start, that isn’t true. A recent study published by the Journal of Physical Activity and Health found that every additional hour of sitting (after sitting for 9 hr) was correlated with a doubling of disability risk. This held true in the study regardless of how much the person exercised.
Example of a Standing Desk
Source: Simplified Building from Flickr
Studies from the Journal of American College of Cardiology and PubMed also found that the increased mortality rates due to sitting persisted despite high levels of physical activity.
Does this mean that we are all doomed to die under the hands of sitting? Worry not! There are solutions! People have come up with products such as standing desks or even treadmill desks…where you can walk while working. However, It would be much easier (and free) to just move around for 20 seconds for every 20 mins of sitting.
– David Ng
